Archive for the ‘carspotting’ tag

If you can get your hands on a copy of the entry list for the 1952 La Carrera Panamericana, then you’re a leg up on everybody else in identifying that year’s race entrants in this photo from Ciudad Juarez that we came across on Tumblr. But not every number is visible, so we’ll still have to do some old-fashioned carspotting on the wide variety of cars here. What do you see?

After our recent look at a couple of Carls Jr. restaurants, Scott McElheney pointed out a Hardee’s 50th anniversary photo retrospective on Flickr that included several photos rip for carspotting. Unfortunately, many of them, including these two, have little context to go with them: only the fuzzy license plates in the above photo and the date of 1976 in the below photo. But if we can’t identify the locations, then we can at least identify the cars in the photos. What do you see here?

Not everything’s bigger in Texas, as we can see from today’s carspotting photo of the Saint Barnabas Episcopal Church in Fredericksburg, which photographer Norman Dietel took sometime in the early 1960s, and which we came across on the Portal to Texas History. How did they ever fit so many people inside such a tiny building? And, for our purposes today, what do you see here?

As with any photo of Brazil, let’s get the Volkswagen Beetles out of the way. This photo of traffic on Rio’s Avenida Venceslau Bras – which we came across on The Oldie But Goodie – is no exception to the rule, with Beetles as almost every other car. But we still have plenty of other Volkswagens and non-Volkswagens alike to identify here, some probably much more difficult than others to pin a model name to. What do you see here?

Howard Arbiture recently found a handful of excellent carspotting photos from Walla Walla, Washington (one of the most fun place names to say), via the Bygone Walla Walla blog, depicting the Jackson-Teague used car lot at the corner of East Rose and North Colville streets. It seems the group of photos on the blog is made up of shots from different days, judging from the shuffle of cars around the lot, but we can be reasonably certain these two were taken on the same day. What do you see here?

Be forewarned, the only reason I’m saying this photo – which Fat Tedy posted to the Station Wagon Forums a few years ago without any context – comes from Ohio is because I vaguely remembered the fact that my home state had white-on-red license plates in 1966 and I see a preponderance of those plates on the cars in the photo. Could it be Cleveland? Cincinnati? Toledo? Some other state? You tell me. Also, what cars do you see here?

UPDATE: Thanks to our intrepid commenters, we now know we’re looking at the Northwest Expressway in Chicago, circa 1961.

Unless my eyes deceive me, those are California yellow-on-black license plates on the cars in this photo we recently spotted on Jim & Chester’s Garage, and that McCall’s California Gas Kitchen in the background seems to confirm the state. Where, exactly, and when we have no idea, nor do we know why that guy’s hogging the lane, unless he’s expecting an empty parking spot in this jampacked parking lot to magically open up for him. What do you see here?

While we’re ogling casinos, let’s stay in Nevada, but head up north to Reno, where these twophotos of what was then called Virginia Street were taken sometime in the latter half of the 1950s. Too bad they’re not nighttime shots. Like Vegas, we see some high-rollers’ cars, but unlike Vegas, we see a lot more of the regular joe sort of cars bthat belong with the locals mingling in with the tourists’s cars. What do you see here?

The same folks from MIT that brought us those overhead shots of traffic in and around Cambridge also took these two photos of Boston’s sun-dappled Union Park sometime in the Fifties. They likely fit into the traffic pattern studies not because of the volume of traffic but because of the island separating the two lanes of traffic—it certainly seemed to keep the roads calmer in the neighborhood, as compared to the apparent chaos of the previous photos in the study. What do you see here?

The great thing about these two photos by Berenice Abbott, taken for the Federal Art Project in the mid-Thirties and hosted on the New York Public Library’s Digital Collections, is that you don’t need to be told they were taken in New York City—they ooze with elements of Gotham, from the taxis to the crowds to the skyscrapers.

Fortunately, Abbott managed to include some automobiles in with the Manhattan scenery, so while they’re not of the 1950s through 1970s era we typically see in our street scene series, they’re still ripe for carspotting. Above, we see Herald Square at 34th and Broadway; below, we see the view from 119 West Street. What do you see here?